[PLUG-TALK] the epidemiology of hate (was Internet's Long Memory)

[Michael Robinson]

On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 12:05 -0800, glen e. p. ropella wrote:
> Thus spake Michael circa 10/02/09 09:50 AM:
> > I cited the source of the particular pair of ASCII art pieces.  I neglected to
> > give credit to Will Cooley who first, to my knowledge, posted one or both of
> > those images to PLUG.  I'm reasonably sure he received them from someone else.

The above are not my words.

> Right.  The point being that, even people in Russell's position where he
> doesn't care so much, honest people, including Russell, do make efforts
> to clarify where stuff comes from.  The only exception is incompetence.
>  I've seen plenty of people who can't use an e-mail client and propagate
> the ">" by accident.  (This usually turns out to be people who don't
> actually _see_ the ">" because they edit their e-mails in some
> bastardized wysiwyg editor, rather than plain text.)
> 
> So, we have 3 cases:
> 
> 1) Michael Robinson didn't use your post.  Instead he actually dredged
> it up from his own archives (which is unbelievable because of the line
> "> Thanks to Michael Robinson for having an archive he could access."),
> 
> 2) Michael Robinson is incompetent and accidentally forgot to delete the
> ">" from the front of the "> Thanks to..." line,
> 
> 3) Michael Robinson is dishonest.

The ascii art is so similar to the original that it would have been
silly for me to recreate it from scratch.

> I lean toward (3) because of the specious and disingenuous
> quasi-rhetoric he uses in his other posts.  But (2) is believable.
> 
> > Which triggered a musical riff and lyrics "I keep feelin' those good ...", now
> > stuck in my brain.
> 
> Since we were talking about Michael Robinson, I was thinking more in
> terms of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, but rather than being
> mediated by prions, it would be mediated by ascii text posted to
> plug-talk by a clearly diseased mind ...

Or maybe you can't take a joke.